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I am joined on today’s show by Ed Daniel. Bit of a coup. Ed is one of Europes leading OSS evangelists but like me shares a background in process management ITIL, security and enterprise enablement. Ed works for Normation and was in London attending DevOps and I didn’t have to push very hard to get him to sit down in front of my microphones.

This podcast is really for the companies who are thinking about deploying Cloud, who are thinking security hardening, process management, ITIL, PCI-DSS, ISO standardisation, deploying against Cloud Security Alliance or SELinux guidelines. If you’re a service provider too this podcast also helps you. It’s your opportunity to hear myself and Ed try and give you a steer on designing your cloud and to get to deployment safely whilst growing the frameworks around Cloud management.

We talk ManageIQ/Cloudforms, how audit and logging is essential, OpenStack and Ceilometer, Heat etc etc. How you should engage with a Cloud provider or upstream vendor.

This is one of those difficult conversations which you rarely hear and that is designed to get you to a point where Open Hybrid Cloud can become a reality. We don’t always agree but between the two of us we try to get you to a point where you are armed to safely and securely start designing and consuming Cloud compute capacity.

What a weird title for a podcast episode you think. Actually, nothing could be further from the truth. Ian and I have worked together in two lives. In 2007 I took a sabbatical to go do hush hush secret stuff in the government space for a major vendor and met Ian and gelled immediately. We’ve worked together ever since and when I joined Red Hat I brought him in soon after. This is a coup because after a life spent in the shadows talking common sense doctrine to governments and people in positions of authority Ian is actually on the record and talking Open Source. To say he was outside his comfort zone is an understatement but it was lovely to have the chance to open a door sensibly and only talk about stuff which doesn’t see us carted off to jail for breaching each of our obligations as signataries of Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act.

Ian had always worked in the proprietary rather sheltered world of data intelligence and manipulation. He definitely wasn’t a Linux user – at all, in fact I gave him his first Linux laptop. He didn’t get Open Source as nobody had ever explained or shown him, didn’t know Open Shift or how to even install Red Hat. A hugely talented versatile developer with a brain the size of a family car and the ability to hold a room in his hand he has become one of the most important hires Red Hat UK has ever made.

Ian, now immersed in Open Source was reborn, reborn with a new verve or vigour and is now truly Mr Red Hat when you put him in front of customers and with his almost unrivalled abilities with the understanding of data storage and data manipulation in the European space is always in demand to help bring projects to conception.

He was nervous as hell recording this, don’t know why – he’s the mac daddy when it comes to big data even if he does hate the term. We talk OpenShift, OpenStack, we pour scorn on some and heap praise on others. A very enjoyable recording session.

I urge you to listen on two fronts:

1) If you’ve ever wondered what Big Data meant come here Ian blow that concept wide apart
2) If you’re considering a change in career and want to understand the passion that drives Red Hatters to go to work – then this is for you.

I’m joined on the podcast today by Max Cooter who is editor of CloudPro Magazine for a remotely recorded podcast, Max in Sussex me in windy wet Wiltshire for a podcast I’ve been meaning to record for some time but last time we tried we couldn’t get diaries to sync. Technology allows us to do next best thing other the ether and this is the result we recorded yesterday. We originally aimed to record 8-10 minutes but the discussion got deeper and we ended up putting a lot of things on the table that are vitally important to decision makers and to cloud in general.

I let the session run and listening back when I was mixing the session in the early hours of this morning I am glad I did because here you have a podcast that might just make people start making notes and thinking about their own plans and provisioning and thinking about the structure of their ambitions in Cloud.

Max is a heavyweight, he talks Cloud for a living but gets to see a lot of the actual cloud metrics and deployments across the entire industry so is more “clued up” than most analysts due to exposure. We’ve worked together on a Dell Think Tank before and we were both out at GigaOM Structure in Amsterdam last year (Max is pictured above on the left during one of the fireside chat sessions).

Do take time out to listen and come back next week where I have a podcast with Tim Kramer my colleague of way way too many years talking OpenSCAP, Cloud Security, OpenShift and the Cloud Security Alliance. Don’t miss it we’re going to make some people sit up.

If you hadn’t noticed theres a bit of a credit crunch on, it’s affecting every aspect of life including provisioning of every aspect of government and military forces and their supporting services and solutions bodies. Governments and the military use en ever increasing amount of Open Source technologies, and a lot of platforms that have grown up with open APIs and that fit secure accreditation regimes.

We’re talking DISA, STAX, how to get to secure PaaS using OpenShift and how we are helping defence (or defense for those over the pond that can’t spell) get to secured accredited trusted PaaS.

David Egts has been on a podcast here before and appears weekly on the Red Hat Gunnar and David show that I listen to avidly. David recently wrote a great article about how military platforms should not be deployed on proprietary PaaS solutions and frameworks, if you haven’t read it go do so before you listen to the podcast.

Thanks for this show also go out to Red Hat’s Paul W Frields who wrote the amazing Pulsecaster that sits on Fedora and that I used in a very different split channel mode this week thats allowed me to get this remote podcast out fast and in great audio quality considering there is 6000 miles between the two people talking. Also this week both David and I are solely using Samson GoMic’s and the entire thing as usual mixed using the free and open source Audacity DAW. The GoMic is a revelation if you don’t know what I’m talking about follow the link.

Come back soon for two podcasts next week talking CloudForms with James Labocki and OpenStack with Rhys Oxenham.

Todays podcast is a must for anyone in Cloud who needs to understand high level security. I’m joined over the ether to my studio in Bath in the UK by Gunnar Hellekson and David Egts. We’re talking access controls, SELinux, sVirt, hardening, security in Government and how we engage in Cloud, security and KVM, Common Criteria – the whole works.

Gunnar is the Chief Technology Strategist in Red Hat’s US Public Sector team, trusted by government and the military alike and David is one of our Principal Architects at Red Hat. They both “live eat breathe” security so this podcast is three of us who are very passionate about the topic.

And folks theres more, if you liked this podcast tune in to the first few episodes of Dave and Gunnar’s new podcast – the appropriately named Dave and Gunnar show which you can listen to by following this link directly. I totally recommend it, great listening. I’ve been working with them over the last few months recommending kit and I really think this is a show you should be listening to on a regular basis. Gunnar and Dave have taken a totally different spin on podcasting that Rhys Oxenham and I have been planning since November to do monthly that I bought the kit to do – but we haven’t had the time to do. Since Christmas we’ve been set up to make the changes I keep mooting, and this will happen.

It’s so nice to be back in the studio able to control the level of audio again, seems like an age since I was sat at a mixing desk recording this stuff. Listening to this podcast you wouldn’t think that David was in Ohio, Gunnar in Houston, Texas and me the other side of the pond, and all recorded produced and released using Fedora – no Mac’s here folks.

Come back soon for some great podcast content and if you haven’t yet subscribed via iTunes or my RSS feed simply follow the menu bar above to get the links you need. Come back next week for some more great content.

After being disrupted by the snowstorms in the UK John and I finally met up and recorded this podcast at the Red Hat offices in Farnborough here in the UK. This is what fell out of that session, hope it’s helpful and gives more context technical details around what ManageIQ brings to Red Hat.

It’s already available on Apple iTunes (download the Podcast client from the Apple Store), Podfeed.net and will be synced with Stitcher Internet Radio very shortly as they update their RSS feeds.

Come back more next week I’m going to be releasing a podcast on Wednesday / Thursday this week and then recording a lot of content at FOSDEM in Brussels weekend of 2nd/3rd February. If you’re going come say hi – who knows you could end up on a podcast !

So Matt and I have been trying to record this for an age, technology and ambient noise from the construction crew extending our Westford office got in the way a few weeks back so plan B – DIY remote podcast over Google+ recorded here in the studio in the UK – what we ended up with was a really good tech chat about OpenShift, hosted on-premise PaaS and a deep dive into SELinux and the reasons both of us have for trying to persuade you to leave it on by default.

If you’re into PaaS, use OpenShift, want to know where we are at with regards to releasing OpenShift On-Premise then you NEED to listen to this. It will at least make you even more excited (I hope) about the next two months of stuff coming out of Red Hat.

Matt, if you’ve heard him speak at Summit, or JUDCon (Google or search YouTube if you want to see re-runs of his talks, well worth the time spent doing it) is infectiously enthusiastic about both PaaS and security by default.